It's all in the flow..
In the modern understanding of learning we've moved away from the idea of a student knowing nothing and the master knowing it all. We've moved away from thinking of knowledge as being like a liquid that we fill into an empty vessel. Bucket knowledge isn't really that useful. We've started to think of effective learning as being more like being in the stream than trying to fill your bucket with water from it. In fact, we don't really measure learning by seeing how full a bucket is, but by how you can apply its contents or better still use the flow to achieve things. Otherwise artificial intelligence would just be about making as big storage as possible wouldn't it? We'd just increase the disk space. Hold on, why don't we hear that expression much any more? Is it because we're starting to realise storage isn't the same thing as usage and we're moving away from just storing data too?
Data and learning have a lot in common. We don't have to think about storing data in the way we used to. Once upon a time it was as if we almost couldn't get too big a bucket. Bucket size was everything. That's not quite the same any more. Storage nowadays is rightfully pretty cheap (you can buy a memory stick with 200GB for a hundred bucks - and this part of the post won't age well), but it's use is limited by its physical nature. Just like a bucket, you can only use it where the bucket is. For data to be truly useful we have to be able to access it wherever it is and for that we're back in the stream. Data, like learning, is far more useful in the stream than stored. It's live when it flows, and dead when it doesn't. Think searching via a browser over searching via an encyclopedia. Think mobilising your storage to the cloud over storing on physical devices.
One of the biggest areas we've noticed recently that this stream shows its usefulness, is around the use of video footage. Increases in digital learning over recent years have led to an even greater reliance on multimedia and video. Even when the end-product isn't the video, there's still a lot of it to be stored whilst it's being edited and enhanced. We've moved away from storing raw video footage on devices and portable drives backed up to other physical media, to uploading straight to the cloud. This brings huge benefits for us to be able to work on media collaboratively and wherever we're located. Where video is concerned you very quickly forget about GB and start talking TB. That can eat up your storage pretty quickly and worse still can slow down your systems when you access it. By mobilising your media into the cloud you can enable streaming of that media that allows your systems to continue to work the way they were designed. That means great benefits for the end users like the ability to access from anywhere without performance issues and collaborative working on files that are simply too large to move around easily.
In today's world where we're seeing more and more data flowing, it's important for us to remember that the key isn't how we store all the data, it's how we use it. How do we get ourselves in the flow, without risk of drowning in the data? It's not a storage issue, it's a usage issue. I've written before that the importance of analytics and big data isn't the amount or where you keep it, it's how you make it digestible. How you connect to the flow of data.
A stream may have too much water for you to capture, but that doesn't mean you can't use it to drive your mill, irrigate your land and provide sustenance. It's all in the flow.
